Real-Time Data Pipelines with Apache Kafka and Flink
Chapter 1: Stream Processing Architectures and Semantics
Evolution of Distributed Logs
Lambda versus Kappa Architecture
Processing Guarantees and Semantics
Event Time versus Processing Time
Hands-on Practical: Designing a Kappa Pipeline
Chapter 2: Advanced Kafka Producer and Consumer Internals
Replication Protocols and ISRs
Idempotent Producers and Transactions
Custom Partitioning Strategies
Consumer Group Rebalancing protocols
Hands-on Practical: Implementing Transactional Writes
Chapter 3: Flink State Management and Checkpointing
State Backends: HashMap versus RocksDB
Asynchronous Barrier Snapshots
Incremental Checkpointing
State Schema Evolution
Hands-on Practical: State Migration with Savepoints
Chapter 4: Advanced Windowing and Time Attributes
Watermark Generation Strategies
Handling Late Data and Side Outputs
Custom Window Triggers and Evictors
Session Windows and Gap Analysis
Hands-on Practical: Building a Custom Trigger
Chapter 5: Low-Level Operations with ProcessFunctions
The ProcessFunction Hierarchy
Timer Services and Event Scheduling
Broadcast State Pattern
Async I/O for External Lookups
Hands-on Practical: Dynamic Rule Evaluation
Chapter 6: Production Deployment and Reliability
Serialization with Avro and Protobuf
Schema Registry Integration
Kafka Connect for Sink and Source
Failure Recovery Strategies
Hands-on Practical: Schema Evolution in Flight
Chapter 7: Performance Tuning and Monitoring
Identifying Backpressure
Memory Management and Slot Allocation
Tuning RocksDB Performance
Kafka Consumer Lag Analysis
Hands-on Practical: Resolving Skewed Data
Chapter 8: Real-Time AI and Feature Engineering
Online Feature Generation
Model Serving Patterns in Streams
Request-Response over Async Streams
Feature Store Integration
Hands-on Practical: Real-Time Inference Pipeline
Hands-on Practical: Designing a Kappa Pipeline
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- The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data's unifying abstraction, Jay Kreps, 2013 (LinkedIn Engineering Blog) - Introduces the concept of the Kappa architecture and emphasizes the log as a central data abstraction.
- Apache Kafka Documentation, Apache Kafka, 2024 (The Apache Software Foundation) - Provides official details on Kafka configurations, operational practices, and architecture.
- Apache Flink Documentation, The Apache Software Foundation, 2025 (The Apache Software Foundation) - Explains Flink's programming model, time semantics, state management, and deployment.
- Kafka: The Definitive Guide: Real-time data and stream processing at scale, Gwen Shapira, Todd Palino, Rajini Sivaram, Krit Petty, 2021 (O'Reilly Media) - A comprehensive resource for understanding Apache Kafka's core concepts, architecture, and practical applications. (2nd edition)
- Stream Processing with Apache Flink: Fundamentals, StreamSQL, and real-time data systems, Fabian Hueske, Vasia Kalavri, 2019 (O'Reilly Media) - Covers Apache Flink's stream processing capabilities, including event time, stateful processing, and fault tolerance.
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